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What to do about social media

The first session I went to today was about building a social media policy. I thought it was going to be more of how to build a social media policy and walking us through the process, but it wasn’t quite like that. Instead it was a panel of four speakers who talked about things they’ve encountered in social media and how they’ve handled it, more giving us ideas of things to think about while constructing a social media policy. This, honestly, was more interesting and more helpful I think than what I was expecting, and I was pleasantly surprised.

A step-by-step guide is great, but one of the huge things about social media policy is the nature of social media: It’s constantly changing, and we can’t anticipate things that are going to come up because we don’t know what’s even going to exist in even just a few months. They told us that the key thing about a social media policy is to be concrete so that it is useful but still flexible enough to adapt with these changes.

The three things that they said we should focus on within a social media policy are: who can access the media sites and the website and guidelines for personal use of staff members on social media. I’m excited to sit down and hash out what this looks like within our own media organization so that we can move forward and really expand our social media presence to its fullest potential.